92 percent of the deep things you feel when your heart is breaking do not have a name in the language you use to buy coffee or talk to your boss at the office. You might be fluent and you might have lived in London for 13 years and you might think in English when you are doing your taxes but when the world turns dark and the old ghosts come back to visit you they do not speak the language of the spreadsheet.

They speak the language of your childhood and they speak the sounds of the kitchen where you grew up and if the person sitting across from you cannot hear those sounds then the work is twice as hard and half as good. This is a fact that the people in the tall buildings do not like to talk about because you cannot put a price on it and you cannot buy it in a hurry when the phone starts to ring.

The Stillness of the Clean Room

I remember standing in the clean room last Tuesday and the light was very bright and the air was very still and I found myself staring at the wall because I had forgotten why I came into the room in the first place. It happens when you work in a place that is so quiet and so sterile and your mind starts to drift because there is no noise to keep it in place.

I was there to check the filters and I was there to make sure the pressure was exactly right but for a minute I was just a man in a white suit wondering what day it was. Then I remembered that the air in this room is the most expensive thing we own and it is expensive because it has been filtered and pushed and cleaned for 730 days without a single second of rest.

If we turned the fans off for even five minutes to save money on the power bill the room would be ruined and it would take us months to get it back to the state it is in right now. You cannot buy a clean room in the moment you need to make a microchip and you have to have a clean room that has been clean for a long time or you have nothing at all.

The Temporal Test

This is the temporal test and it is the only test that matters when you are building a team or a business or a life. Most managers are taught to buy what they need when they need it and they call it being lean and they call it being smart but they are only being smart about the things that can be bought.

You can buy a chair and you can buy a laptop and you can buy a box of pens and they will arrive the next day and everything will be fine. But you cannot buy a forest and you cannot buy a reputation and you cannot buy the ability to speak 22 languages with the nuance of a native speaker who has spent ten years learning how the mind works.

Those things are not commodities and they are not things you can pick up from a panel of contractors when the demand goes up. They are things you carry and they are things you hold and they are things that look like a waste of money until the very second that they become the only thing that matters.

The Admiral’s Acorns

I think about Lord Collingwood who was a great admiral in the British Navy and he was a man who understood the clock in a way that we have forgotten. He would walk around his estate and he would walk through the English countryside and he would carry a pocket full of acorns and he would plant them in the hedgerows and the fields.

He did not do this because he liked trees and he did not do this because he wanted a nice view from his window. He did it because he knew that the Navy needed oak to build the ships that would protect the country and he knew that an oak tree takes 103 years to grow big enough to make a mast or a hull.

He knew he would be dead and his children would be dead and the king would be dead before those trees were ready for the axe but he planted them anyway because he knew that you cannot buy an oak tree when the war starts. If you do not have the forest ready when the enemy is on the horizon then you have already lost and no amount of gold can make a tree grow faster.

Readiness vs. Efficiency

We see this same struggle in the meetings where people talk about how to run a mental health practice and they look at the numbers and they see that we have clinicians who speak Farsi or Greek or Japanese or Italian. They see that maybe nobody has asked for a session in Farsi for 18 days and they think that we are being inefficient because we are keeping that capability in the building when we could just call someone on a list if a Farsi speaker ever shows up.

They want to move to a panel and they want to pay per hour and they want to turn the fans off in the clean room to save a bit of cash. But they do not understand that the value is in the holding and the value is in the readiness. If a man calls us and he is in a crisis and he needs to speak his truth in the only language that feels real to him then we cannot tell him to wait while we check a list and see if the contractor is free on Thursday. We have to have the person there and we have to have the trust and we have to have the shared culture already built into the walls of the practice.

One Roof, Many Voices

This is why we do what we do at

Mind a Porter

and it is why we keep 22 languages under one roof even when it makes the accountants scratch their heads. We know that therapy is not just about the words and it is about the feeling of being understood without having to translate your soul into a different shape.

We have over 28 different ways to help people and we have 13 different services and we do everything from ADHD assessments to trauma work and we do it in the language you think in. We bill the insurance companies directly so the clients do not have to worry about the money up front and they do not have to chase people for months to get their money back. We do all of this because we want the room to be ready and we want the air to be clean and we want the oak trees to be grown before the storm hits the coast.

Beyond Just-In-Time Humans

The modern world is obsessed with the idea that everything can be bought and everything can be turned into a stream of data that flows just in time. But the things that make us human are the things that take time and the things that stay the same when everything else is moving.

“A clinical psychologist who has spent years learning how to help a person with complex trauma is not a resource that you can just plug in like a lamp.”

– Mental Health Perspective

They are a person who has built a capability and they are part of a team that has built a culture and that culture is what holds the client when the client feels like they are falling apart. You cannot assemble that on a Friday afternoon because you got a new contract and you cannot buy it from a company that just matches people with names on a screen.

I see the same thing in the clean room when we get a new guy who thinks he can skip the steps and he thinks he can just walk in and start the work. He does not understand that the stillness is the work and the waiting is the work and the carrying of the cost is the work. He thinks he is being fast but he is just being dirty and he will realize his mistake when the chips come out and they are all broken and they are all useless. You have to respect the clock and you have to respect the things that cannot be rushed and you have to be willing to pay for the inefficiency of being ready.

7 Things a Spreadsheet Will Never Understand

We live in a time where people try to shave the edges off everything and they try to make everything as thin as possible so they can save a few pennies here and there. They turn the heat down and they fire the people who have been there the longest and they outsource the things that they think are not core to the business.

But they are cutting the roots of the oak trees and they are letting the dust into the clean room and they are wondering why the world feels so fragile and why everything breaks as soon as the wind picks up. You have to decide what kind of world you want to live in and you have to decide if you want to be a person who plants acorns or a person who just waits for the wood to go on sale. I know which one I would rather be and I know which one I want looking after my mind when the light goes out.

We keep the clinic in London open and we keep the online sessions running and we make sure that the practitioners are the best in their field and we do it in 22 languages. We do not do it because it is the cheapest way to run a business and we do not do it because a book told us to do it.

We do it because we have seen what happens when the language is missing and we have seen what happens when the assessment is rushed and we have seen the look on a persons face when they finally feel like they have come home. That feeling is what we are carrying and it is what we are protecting and it is the only thing that really counts at the end of the day.

You can measure the cost of the clinicians and you can measure the cost of the building but you can never measure the cost of the help that was not there when it was needed. That is the hidden tax of the modern world and it is a tax that we refuse to pay. In the clean room we say that the price of perfection is constant work and in therapy we say that the price of healing is constant presence. Both are true and both are worth every penny.